Kate's Point of View

Sometimes you travel along in life and, without meaning to, end up losing touch with some of your friends. Then one of them picks up the phone and calls you and, like on a train on Space Mountain, you are hurtled back to five years ago in college sitting at a bar with a pitcher of beer between you. You’re on the phone completing each other sentences and getting each worked up into annoyed fury about things like dial-up internet and plastic bracelets for a cause – more on those things at a later date. And the next night, while drinking beer from the beautiful glass you rightfully stole, you remember how much that friendship means to you.

I have this collection of beer classes – okay, three of them don’t make a very big collection, but no matter – that are all stolen. In fact, they are all stolen from locales across Europe and all while in the company of my friend Dave.

Glass number one if by far the best, though.

Our first night in London visiting Ricky, after my killer nap on the double-decker bus tour through the city, we are sitting in a pub have beers and discovering the joy that is Stella Artois. Our Stella is served in these beautiful pint glasses that are a little taller than normal and have this little lip around the top. After hours of sleep and the disorientation of jetlag, we are promptly drunk – the kind of drunk where I am easily convinced to get and fetch cigarettes from random people. I am dared to go and get a fag off the boys at the bar – to see if I am willing to say fag, and be Brit enough to use their slang for cigarettes. I am not. At all. But I am American enough to enjoy being the drunk foreign girl with the accent. I had an accent in London! Why did this not occur to me before going there? In Cincinnati I know I have an accent and say my O’s funny and probably bagel too. I can’t say “monster” and tend to say “alls.” But that does not, in my mind, an accent make. But to the boys at the bar who gave me some cigarettes, I was a drunk yank. Back at the table, sharing stolen cigarettes, Ricky, Dave and I ogled are glasses. I can’t speak for Ricky. Maybe as a resident of London he felt wrong stealing from that fabulous little pub. Us yanks though, we slipped those glasses right into our bags.

And beer in a stolen Stella Artois glass, if you have not had it, is wonderful.